Email Lists - Email Marketing Run Amok? (It Can Be Bad For Your Business)
Even if you don't possess a business and don't have any interest in Internet marketing (maybe you don't even know what that is), for those who have email address, you have experienced the uglier side. You've probably even seen the advertisements for email address lists offering thousands-or even millions-of email addresses for pocket change. Did you ever wonder how anyone could come up with a lot of addresses?
You may rest assured of one thing: if the price is inexpensive, these are not opt-in lists. Instead, these huge lists are loaded with “harvested” email addresses. They may be equal to some summary of street addresses chosen from the telephone book.
Largely, the addresses are picked from forums, student or membership lists, newsgroups, message boards, web logs, along with other areas where folks gather to innocently swap information. They don't know their addresses are being gathered up and sold on the open market. They did not ask to be added to a mass e-mail list. And they definitely did not ask to have their inboxes polluted with spam.
Picking email addresses is just not illegal. But it is broadly considered unethical. You pay a fine or will not go to jail. However, you might hurt your business, perhaps irreparably. The possible outcomes for violating the unwritten rule from losing your ISP to having your business blacklisted to losing your domain.